[Dixielandjazz] "The Jazz Standards" reviewed -- Washington Post, August 19, 2012

[Robert Ringwald]

Setting the Record Straight
by Dennis Drabelle
Washington Post, August 19, 2012
In a tense moment at the end of Annie Dillard's memoir "Encounters with Chinese Writers"
(1984), nothing less than the honor of American popular music hangs in the balance.
"American songs have no feeling, no depth," a visiting Chinese novelist complains
to Dillard and a colleague. "They are too bouncy -- not subtle." Rising to the occasion,
Dillard and her colleague break into an a cappella version of "St. James Infirmary."
"That's better," the visitor responds.
Like Dillard and her colleague, I assumed "St. James Infirmary" was all-American,
based on a real institution that treated patients in New Orleans. After all, isn't
the 1928 recording of the tune by Crescent City native Louis Armstrong the definitive
one? Wrong town -- even wrong country -- argues jazz and blues scholar Ted Gioia
in his richly informative new book, "The Jazz Standards."
"According to the most common current interpretation of this song's meaning," he
writes, "St. James Infirmary" originated as an English ballad about St. James Hospital
in London. Despite "the peculiarity, at least within the American popular music tradition,
of a love song delivered to a corpse," the non-bouncy "St. James Infirmary" has become
what Gioia calls "a well-traveled cultural meme." In 1975, it even memed its way
to 30 Rockefeller Center, where Lily Tomlin sang it on "Saturday Night Live" "while
seated atop the piano with the band dressed as nurses."
Gioia delivers this kind of in-depth notation (and correction of the record) again
and again. Calling them "the soundtrack of my own life," he takes the reader through
hundreds of songs, rounding out each entry (they appear in alphabetical order by
title) with a list of his recommended versions. His main criterion for selection
is "significance in the jazz repertoire of the current era," and though I missed
a few favorites ("Fever," for example, recorded by Little Willie John, Peggy Lee
and Beyonce, among others), it's hard to quarrel with Gioia's seemingly encyclopedic
knowledge of what's still hot and what's not.
Among his choices are "All of Me," by Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons, and "All of
You," by Cole Porter. The latter song becomes a springboard for a discussion of censorship.
Porter, of course, packed an incomparably witty series of double entendres into his
song "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love" (another omission from the book; for my money,
nobody sang it better than Ella Fitzgerald). Although less well-known, "All of You"
stretched the limits of the allowable, too. As Gioia reports, the Motion Picture
Association of America "found the references to making a 'tour of you' with a rest
stop at the 'south of you' potentially offensive to American sensibilities." In the
end, the censors relented, and Fred Astaire sang the song as written in the movie
"Silk Stockings" (1957).
Gioia is normally indefatigable in tracking a song as it ramifies from its origins
(most often, Tin Pan Alley or Broadway) to various media, but occasionally he misses
a turn. He devotes an entry to "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" by Jimmy McHugh
and Dorothy Fields -- and deservedly so. But in a discussion that runs to almost
two pages, he says not a word about the song's prominence in "Bringing up Baby" (1938),
the great screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, directed by Howard
Hawks. Not only does the song mollify Baby, a leopard that has clawed its way into
the plot, but the two stars' duet is far from shabby.
More often, though, Gioia examines a song from every angle. In discussing McHugh
and Fields's "On the Sunny Side of the Street," he notes that some commentators have
"conjectured that the 'sunny side' of this song refers to African Americans who passed
as white." Gioia thinks not, and surely he is right: The song seems too carefree
to bear such a fraught interpretation. To paraphrase the African American comedian
Flip Wilson, sometimes it's as simple as this: What you hear is what you get.
Gioia closes, fittingly, with one last Cole Porter entry: "You'd Be So Nice to Come
Home To." "The Jazz Standards" itself is awfully nice to dip into.
__________
Drabelle is a contributing editor of Book World. His new book, "The Great American
Railroad War," will be published at the end of the month.


-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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